Most of us are still working in a very hybrid type of environment. We carry mobile phones and PDAs and use these for personal and one to one communications. We may or may not carry laptops and the paraphenalia of note books, pens, rulers and so on.

What I’ve noticed lots of people doing (and I do it myself) is to make copious notes in books during meetings and then we may or may not type these points up and circulate to other people. I’ve started to try and make electronic notes during meetings as these can then be shared with other people. It does work. I made a lot of notes during an information governance meeting on Monday and without any further work have been able to email them to someone. I would have taken an hour or two to have typed them from hand written notes.

But is this enough? It’s still a hybrid environment.

Would it not be better to create a wiki environment for a meeting where everyone has access to a keyboard (they really don’t all need a computer - that could be centralised). Comments could be projected onto a screen so we can all see what everyone else is writing. And everyone could add their comments and ideas as the meeting progresses. At the end, there is a record of the contributions, conclusions, actions and recommendations. This can then be agreed there and then, removing the need for someone to type this all up and then circulate for suggestions. The meeting is over when the meeting is over, there is no tail end of work that someone needs to pick up.

It’s not just the ‘desktop’ metaphor that holds computing back, it’s the whole application of the technology itself.